A n article published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science lays out a developing cycle resulting from increasing wildfire frequency: lower retained snowpack, diminishing summer water supplies, and drying that increases landscape flammability. Rocky Mountain subalpine forests used to burn at 200-300 frequencies. Not anymore. Western forests are increasingly caught in a vicious climate cycle.
This escalating frequency of wildland fires has broadscale consequences for environmental services provided by forests and watersheds. And all across the American West, water is becoming a dwindling resource.